PEORIA — Legal costs could be the hot topic at the Peoria School District 150 board meeting Monday, which also includes an update on the budget, a report on the board’s meeting structure, and a vote on salary increases, ranging from 1 percent to 3 percent, for employees not covered by unions.

While the board is scheduled to vote on a three-year contract to hire a chief legal officer at $150,000 a year, not including benefits, retired teacher Sharon Crews plans to raise questions about the costs of the district’s four-month internal investigation of testing irregularities at Charter Oak Primary School. Legal fees for the investigation came to at least $130,000.

In a related note, the Illinois State Board of Education’s subsequent investigation should be completed soon, according to Mary Fergus, a spokeswoman for the agency. The investigation centered on irregularities or possible cheating in how teachers administered standardized tests to special education students and whether former Charter Oak principal John Wetterauer gave teachers the required training on how to administer the tests.

Legal costs and recent departures of Charter Oak staff, either through retirement or transfer, may also bring out a contingent of Charter Oak parents and other supporters who maintain Superintendent Grenita Lathan unfairly targeted the national award-winning school and Wetterauer in the investigation. Wetterauer went on medical leave after he was reassigned to a different school, then retired. Two teachers also were transferred after the district’s investigation.

Crews learned of legal fees of at least $130,000 in billable hours through a Freedom of Information Act request. Stan Eisenhammer, a partner in the law firm of Hodges, Loizzi, Eisenhammer, Rodick and Kohn, which represents District 150, acknowledged the cost.

The $130,000 figure does not include additional fees charged to handle teachers’ union grievances related to the case, Eisenhammer said. But those charges were difficult to separate from about $30,000 in fees the FOIA-ed documents show were charged for other grievances and personnel matters charged from November 2013 to February 2014. The Charter Oak investigation occurred during the same time period.

Portions of the released documents, listing specific names involved in interviews and conferences, as well as several large blocks of data, were blacked out, apparently so as not to divulge privileged information.

Eisenhammer said conducting a fair investigation required more work, which increased costs. The district’s preliminary investigation, which was submitted to the state board, concluded the evidence “suggests some form of cheating occurred” to benefit former Charter Oak students.

Teachers at Mark Bills Middle School first raised questions about the test scores of special education students after they noticed substantial drops in scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT, for special education students who transferred to Mark Bills from Charter Oak.

Page 2 of 2 - The investigation required interviewing teachers and principals from both schools and 26 students who went from Charter Oak to Mark Bills from 2011 to 2013. Parents of the students involved were present in all but one case, Eisenhammer said, which also led to discussions with the parents.

Attorneys also organized and analyzed testing data from multiple schools to compare how much test scores changed for students at similar schools as they progressed from primary to middle school.

School districts are required to report testing irregularities to the state board. One-time instances of irregularities are not unusual, such as failure to give students proper instructions on taking the tests. Allegations of irregularities that span several years are “uncommon,” according to Fergus, the state board spokeswoman.

In previous cases of testing irregularities at other District 150 schools, the failures to follow proper protocols were discovered during the ISAT testing period and reported by school staff.

“There was nothing to investigate” in those cases, Eisenhammer said. At Charter Oak, however, the alleged irregularities occurred over several years and were raised by teachers at Mark Bills.